Canon EOS D60 Review

• Review
• Sample Pictures

by Bryan Carnathan
Review Date: 2003-11-22

This is where digital SLR photography started for me. The Canon D60 proved to be an amazing piece of equipment - An affordable digital SLR camera that accepts all of Canon's incredible EOS lenses. This is also an amazing photography learning tool. Instant feedback with complete control over exposure - and taking an extra hundred digital pictures essentially costs nothing! The ability of the Canon D60 to take one picture at ISO 100 and the next at ISO 1000 is a huge advantage over the film world! Coupled with the incredible Canon EOS lenses, the Canon D60 DSLR produced beautiful, smooth 6.3 megapixel digital pictures. The 1.6 "field of view crop factor" (the sensor is smaller than a 35mm film back - the outer 40% or so of the lens is not used) makes this camera perfect for nature photography. Keep into mind that focal lengths listed for digital pictures taken with this camera should be multiplied by 1.6 to get their 35mm field-of-view-equivalent focal length. Getting a wide angle lens is a more significant problem if that is your interest. The Canon D60 also excelled at taking long, low-noise exposures, making it a leader in digital night and low-light photography.

The biggest downside of this camera for me was the focus speed - and the near inability for the Canon D60 to focus in low light. Once you learn to work around this limitation, it really is not much of a problem. Attaching a Canon 420EX and Canon 550EX Speedlite Flashes help the focusing issue with their infrared focus assist light. The size of Canon D60 may be a bit much for some people's general needs, but the image quality is excellent. Someone used to mid-sized and larger SLR cameras will have no problems with the Canon D60's size. My copy of the D60 tended to underexpose using auto-exposure with no exposure compensation. This is a better problem than overexposure because post processing can bring the exposure up to where it should be (blown highlights from overexposure cannot be recovered).

It took the new Canon EOS 10D DSLR at a great price to make me give up the D60. More about that in the Canon 10D Review.

   Sample Pictures

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